


Kasterborous

by galaxyowl



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Post-Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25737376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galaxyowl/pseuds/galaxyowl
Summary: The morning after fleeing the ruins of Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS, Yasmin Khan wakes up early and goes to work.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 3
Kudos: 41





	Kasterborous

**Author's Note:**

> this was my piece for the recent issue of the thirteenth doctor fanzine! which means i wrote it in, like, march. aka ten thousand years ago.

The morning after fleeing the ruins of Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS, Yasmin Khan wakes up early and goes to work. She smiles politely at her boss and makes small talk with her coworkers and promises that yes, really, she’s back this time, no she doesn’t think she’s going to be pulled away like that again. That mission was over.

She gives out parking tickets. She startles at unexpected noises, listening for that wheezing engine sound. She never hears it.

She checks her phone notifications at the end of her shift and is immediately drowning in the logistics of how, exactly, three people from however-many-thousand years in the future are going to integrate into modern-day life with nothing but a disguised TARDIS to their name.

Yaz sits on the bench outside the police station and takes a breath. Just trying to wrap her head around the situation is exhausting, but someone’s got to help these people. And since the Doctor—

No. She’s not thinking about that just yet.

She offers to meet up with Ethan and Ravio and Yedlarmi and talk through some stuff with them (“Earth 101,” Ryan jokes) and she does not get back to her family’s apartment until the sun has already begun to set. She mutters an apology to her parents as she heads to her room and promptly collapses onto the bed.

She lies there, looking up at the ceiling.

Tears blur the edges of her vision, without warning. She hadn’t cried at all yesterday or today but now she can’t seem to stop.

Yaz tries to tell herself that she’s allowed to be upset about one of the most important people in her life _dying_ , but doesn’t quite believe it. It had been the right choice, hadn’t it? The Doctor for the universe.

She sits up in her bed and wipes her face with her sleeve, trying to steady her breathing. Outside her bedroom window, stars have begun to appear in the sky, and Yaz allows her gaze to linger there. There’s just little enough light pollution that she can make out a handful of constellations, each star a glittering point in the darkness.

Are any of them ones she’s visited? She should have paid more attention to the Doctor’s ramblings. Should have asked her to point out every location on a map so that she could fold it up and keep it tucked in her jacket pocket forever. Should have tried harder to make her come with them, or accepted what was happening so she could give her a proper goodbye. She should have tried to tell her how she felt.

It takes Yaz a while to fall asleep that night.

***

Exactly one of those idle thoughts is something she can do anything about. Yaz spends the next few evenings scrolling Wikipedia pages about the stars, teaching herself the shape of the sky, the way it changes with the seasons, how to locate the north star (a guiding light for travelers of old; a burning thing so very far away but always right there where they needed it).

If Kasterborous is a real constellation, it’s not one that’s visible from Earth. That particular dead-end is frustrating; she’d felt so clever when she’d managed to remember that scrap of detail, had been convinced that she would be able to find the Doctor’s home in the night sky.

The Doctor’s home. She was still processing that, in the midst of everything. That the reason she hadn’t wanted to bring them there had been because it was a world post-apocalypse. (She still didn’t understand why the Doctor hadn’t felt like she could tell them. Could tell _her_.)

Yaz is sitting on the couch, laptop open to a webpage about galaxies, when she becomes aware of Sonya hovering nearby.

She resists the urge to ask how long she’s been there. “What is it?” she says instead.

Sonya takes a seat on a chair opposite her. “How long do you think you’ll be back this time?”

“I don’t know,” Yaz says. “They don’t tell me in advance when these things are going to come up.”

“Right,” Sonya says. “I forgot, all that travel’s to do with your _job_.”

“What are you trying to say?” Yaz sets the laptop to the side. She probably should not feel as offended as she does at the implication that she’s lying, given that she is.

Sonya shrugs. “I’m not judging.” She eyes Yaz a moment, in silence, and there’s something in her gaze that makes Yaz wish she hadn’t put aside the computer; at least then she’d have somewhere else she could focus.

“I think it’s going to be a while, this time,” she says. “I think I’m going to be home for a good long while.”

“Suppose Mum and Dad’ll be glad to hear that.” Sonya stands, but doesn’t move to leave. “Yaz,” she says, “seriously—are you all right?”

Yaz smiles. “I’m fine.”

(It should be convincing. She learned from the best, after all.)

***

“How does the Doctor fit into all of this?” Ravio says, and Yaz freezes. She and Ravio and Graham are sitting at a kitchen table in the house-TARDIS, tea in hand, the others in the next room over.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“Well,” Ravio says, “when we first arrived here I assumed that she, and this—“ She gestures vaguely, indicating the TARDIS. “—were all from this same time and place. But they’re not, are they?”

“No,” Yaz says. She intends to say more, but words don’t come.

“So who is she?”

Yaz isn’t sure she knows. From what she’d pieced together it had sounded like the Doctor hadn’t been entirely sure herself, at the end. Had Yaz even really known her at all? It felt like she had kept diving deeper into the truth of who the Doctor was but never hit the bottom.

She wonders, on her worse days, how much darker the Doctor’s depths could have gotten. There’s no doubt in her mind that she would have swam the whole distance, if she’d had to.

That isn’t what Ravio is asking. There are answers Yaz could give her that would help her, but her tongue has turned to ice in her mouth.

“She’s from that planet we went to, remember?” Graham jumps in. “‘Course, we didn’t even know that about her until a good while after we’d met her.”

He talks. He lays out the basics of what they know about the Doctor in a way that makes it all sound perfectly reasonable.

Yaz drinks her tea, and doesn’t say anything.

***

Yaz is sitting with her legs dangling out the TARDIS door, the cosmos stretched out in front of her, when someone lays a hand on her shoulder.

It’s the Doctor.

“How are you holding up?” she says, taking a seat beside her.

Yaz shrugs. “Well as can be expected, I suppose.”

“‘Course you are,” the Doctor says. “What’s a little death between friends?”

Yaz laughs. “What about you?” she says. “How are you? Did you make it out of there okay?”

“Maybe I did,” she says. “It would certainly be nice to think that I did, wouldn’t it?” She goes quiet. Neither of them say, _That doesn’t make it true._

The Doctor looks out at the star-studded void around them, the wisps of nebula drifting past, and Yaz follows her gaze. She lays her head on the Doctor’s shoulder.

“What are we looking at?” she says, after a moment.

The Doctor glances down at Yaz’s face. “Gallifrey,” she says softly, pointing at one of the brighter stars. “Those six stars make up the constellation of Kasterborous.” Tracing the shape with her finger.

“Can we visit?” Yaz says. “Your home?” In this moment, she knows neither that the planet burned nor that she’s asked this before.

The Doctor rests her hand back on the TARDIS floor, touching Yaz’s. Then she takes Yaz’s hand, lacing their fingers together. “Another time,” she says.

“Promise?”

“You know,” the Doctor says, as if she didn’t hear Yaz’s question, “it’s only a constellation because we’re parked at the right point in space to see it. Those stars are in actuality hundreds of lightyears away from one another. Because that’s the thing—constellations, they aren’t a collection of burning plasma and the spaces in-between. They’re the stories that people tell.”

Yaz lifts her head so she can see the Doctor’s face. “Why do you care, then,” she says, “if it’s not actually physics?”

“Few things in the universe are more powerful than a story,” the Doctor says. “Did you ever have to read all those Greek ones your constellations were named after? Tragedies, love stories, tales of heroism. That’s a constellation.”

“Which one is this?” Yaz says, nodding towards Kasterborous. “Tragedy or love story?”

“Yasmin Khan,” the Doctor says, “weren’t you listening?” She meets Yaz’s eyes in a moment that lasts an eternity. “It all depends on where you’re viewing it from.”

Yaz awakes from the dream to be greeted only by the sight of her blank ceiling, and lays there staring up at it for a long moment.

A tight longing lodges itself in her chest. She and the Doctor had never been physically affectionate like that in reality. Is it terrible of her, to want the Doctor to be anything other than what she is? Was. Will be—tenses are complicated with time travel; so much of their past hasn’t happened yet. Thousands of years in the future, she and the Doctor are still a bright, shimmering _maybe_.

But in this now, the Doctor is gone, and Yaz is left with her own feelings, and nothing to do with them.

She rolls over and buries her face in her pillow.

***

“Did something happen between you and that Doctor person?” Yaz’s mum asks over dinner one night. “Haven’t seen her around in a while.”

“No.” Yaz stares down at her food. The lie burns on her tongue. “Nothing happened. She’s just busy.”

“That’s too bad,” her dad says, “I rather liked her.”

The conversation moves on. Yaz attempts to put the exchange out of her mind, and almost succeeds until later that evening when Sonya corners her and says, “Okay, you’re going to tell me what _actually_ happened with the Doctor.”

“What?” Yaz says.

“I don’t buy it,” Sonya says. She’s standing in the doorway to Yaz’s room, blocking her exit for the moment. “That nothing happened. Not with the way your face looked when Mum asked.”

Yaz stares at her. Was it really that obvious?

She tries to come up with an answer that feels satisfactory without being horrifyingly unfair to the Doctor’s memory, and draws a blank.

“She’s dead,” she says.

Sonya laughs. Yaz doesn’t.

Sonya goes very quiet for a moment. Finally, she just says, “You’re serious?”

Yaz nods. And, oh, there are the tears again, hovering at the edge of her vision. Telling someone makes it real somehow.

“What happened?” Sonya says.

“She…” Yaz trails off. She takes a seat on the edge of her bed for fear she’ll crumple to the ground if she tries to stay standing. Sonya steps over and sits beside her.

Screw it. “How much did you know about her?” Yaz says.

“Not much,” Sonya says, brows knitting in confusion. “I only met her the couple of the times.”

“Right.” Yaz takes a deep breath. “But, you know, in those couple of times, did she mention that she was a time-traveling alien?”

Sonya starts to stand. “Yaz, if this is your idea of a joke—“

“No!” Yaz gets to her feet as well. “Please, just… just listen, okay?”

Sonya looks at her. Yaz can’t imagine what must be going through her head; she can see how absurd the statement sounds. But now that she’s had the idea to tell her she doesn’t think she can survive much longer without doing it.

Sonya sits down. Yaz does too.

And Yaz tells her. She tells her about a woman who fell from the sky, about a ghost monument, about alien creatures, about Rosa Parks, about Nikola Tesla, about a universe hidden in a mirror, about nightmare gods. About the way a nebula looks from up close. About the way the Doctor’s smile makes her feel like she could do anything. About a lone Cyberman, and a boundary in spacetime, and a sacrifice.

“Do you believe me?” she says, when she’s finished. She needs Sonya to say yes more than she knows how to describe.

There is silence, for a long, painful moment. Then Sonya laughs. “I do,” she says. I shouldn’t, but I do.”

Yaz lets out a breath. She’d been holding it for far too long.

“After all,” Sonya says, “I don’t think you’re near creative enough to come up with all that on your own.”

Yaz shoves her, laughing. “Shut up.”

***

Warm light pours from the door of Ryan and Graham’s house as Yaz steps out, the sky outside darkening towards night.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Ryan says.

“Me too,” she says, with a smile. “It’s always good to see both of you.”

She had come over to their place for dinner that evening. It’s not the first time they’d done something like this (Ryan had told her once that he thought Graham was worried about them all losing touch; she wasn’t sure how much of that wasn’t him), but it was the first time that they hadn’t talked about Gallifrey, or the Doctor, or any of it, at all.

It wasn’t intentional. But Yaz started telling a story about the mixup at work the other day that had resulted in her and three other people all responding to the same call, and then Ryan jumped on the extremely tenuous connection of a phone call to start asking her about Sonya’s number again; this time, though, she had Graham on her side, and Ryan promised to drop it, and Yaz laughed and said that if he really wanted she could give Sonya his number, and at _that_ point they realized they’d forgotten to check the oven, and the food was burnt but tasted better than anything Yaz could remember eating.

As she starts down the steps to the street, now, her gaze, without her conscious effort, traces the shape of constellations in the early evening sky.

***

Months after fleeing the ruins of Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS, Yasmin Khan awakens to a familiar sound. For a heartbeat, she’s sure it was part of a dream, but the noise persists even as her thoughts begin to order themselves. Distant, but unmistakable. Yaz throws off the covers, immediately awake.

She pulls a jacket on over her nightclothes and skids out of her room, shoving boots on. It might not be the Doctor, she knows that, of course, there are other TARDISes—but she has to see.

No one else in the apartment is awake yet as Yaz slips outside into the early dawn. She doesn’t even know what to do with the possibility that it could be her, what that would mean for her life, to have the Doctor abruptly thrown back into it, but her feet carry her down the stairs anyways.

By the time she’s made it to the street, the sound has faded to nothing. Yaz scans her surroundings, trying to calm her racing pulse. Maybe she had imagined it after all.

But she’d been so sure.

Then she spots it, a splash of blue, and she is running again, boots on asphalt.

Yaz slows as she approaches. She doesn’t dare think too hard about what she is seeing (a police box, wooden and unassuming and perfect) for fear it will prove an illusion. And then Yaz is at the door, fingers grazing the grain of the wood, and she lets herself believe it.


End file.
